Digital Ocean 512MB VPS with FreeBSD?

Thomas Monte

Thomas Monte

I am interested in getting a Digital Ocean $5 image that is 512MB RAM and I am considering FreeBSD. I like the price, but I also want to see how much performance I can squeeze out of a low end system. If I have to, I can step up to the $10/1 GB system. I am fairly technical so I think I can make any of these solutions work. I used OpenBSD for a few years and loved the system, but stopped using it for various reasons.

I have a Linux Mint 17.1 machine for Python and Java development. If FreeBSD 10.1 supported native Steam, I would probably change my home machine as well. I would like to push my production code to a server that runs java, python, and Django. I also want to use the machine for OpenVPN, Owncloud, and Postfix+IMAP for myself, wife and kids. Digital Ocean offers six operating systems, but I am only interested in three - FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu. I wrote up the pros and cons, but I am still undecided. Debian and Ubuntu would be much easier to setup, but really aren't as interesting. They also have more guides for setting up Django and ownserver. Basically, I am the most interested in FreeBSD, but dreading and weirdly at the same time looking forward to the effort involved in getting everything running.

Any advice would be appreciated. I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the FreeBSD project. Thank you for your time.
 
I've read bad things about DO's installation of FreeBSD but that's all I can say. As far as the rest of it goes, I have three low usage sites with 512Mb of ram but I don't use Django.

You might want to look at Ramnode or Vultr. Ramnode is very user friendly but basically a one-man show though he has plenty of help.
 
I've been using a DO FreeBSD 10.1 (512MB) install since the day DO announced FreeBSD was available without any issues. The system runs mail and web servers. The only significant tweak was to add a file for swap space (128MB).
 
I have OwnCloud running on a VPS and there's a lot to like about it, especially now that the clients have matured and are now quite solid and reliable. But it is a resource hog. If you only hosting a few files for a few incidental users 512MB RAM may be OK, especially if you switch off full-text indexing.

Like (I think) a fair number of people here, I have a FreeBSD VPS at transip.nl, which is a FreeBSD shop.
 
Not sure how relevant this is to the OP but I've been running FreeBSD 10.1 on Digitalocean for a month now.
I reinstalled it with ZFS support and run couple of jails in it. So far so good. 512MB of ram is a bit low though (especially if you use ZFS) but is is usable and stable (for now at least).
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I've read bad things about DO's installation of FreeBSD
Click to expand...

Would you mind sharing where we can read about this? I've tried to google this a few times but got no reasonable results. I'd like to know what the community thinks of the setup. I'm relatively new to the distro, so I'd make use of some guidance here.

Thanks.
 
DigitalOcean's FreeBSD offering is good, but be aware that their images are currently UFS only. I am currently running my startup's customer facing elements on DO's FreeBSD images. I have a number of VMs in their different regions, each with a standard config (three jails - Nginx, API server, and Redis) all on the smallest $5 each per month plan (these will be bumped up as customer load grows). Since I started six months ago, there has been no downtime apart from one DC migration which took about 10 minutes.
 
I've been using Gandi's FreeBSD option for quite a while... they were experimental images but recently became fully supported. They are also migrating from Xen to PVHVM which I think means you can more easily install a custom system / kernel (I may be wrong here I'm not super knowledgeable about virtualisation technologies).

They have ready made FreeBSD 10.2 images both UFS and ZFS options. I tried ZFS when they were experimental but could not grow the file system to the virtual disk capacity so went back to UFS (this may have been due to my ignorance or may have been fixed by now).

You will find Gandi are probably more expensive than DigitalOcean, and I can't offer you a first hand comparison but I find Gandi is fast. I think they have a different pricing model where you pay for what you use in a more fine grained way (you can scale different resources up and down and get charged pennies for powered off instances - mainly ipv4 interface cost).

I like it because it's good for experimenting with stuff... I can max out the cores and RAM briefly when compiling something or playing with something performance sensitive then put it back to 1 core 256MiB if I just want to use it as a proxy or something. I don't use it for hosting anything so I can't comment there - and I tend to wipe it / restore a clean image frequently because of my repetitive experimentation.

One serious issue I have had is locking up during high network throughput (around > 30MiB/s) I found this when fetching a large file and getting locked out of ssh... It seems to not happen with wget - instead after a while wget complains that the connection is terminated and automatically restarts it, but obviously that's better than hanging the whole system. I do not know if this is an issue specific to Gandi or FreeBSD, have not investigated further.
 
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